Katie is the Business Unit Controller for Silver King, one of the most successful commercial refrigeration manufacturers and installers in the country. Katie handles all of the accounting and finance for the company, including pricing and costing, financial analysis, expense report audits, procurement and purchasing, and much more. Katie urges any students interested in business to spend some time in an accounting department to get a first-hand, real-world look at how a business operates.
Transcript
My name is Katie Meyer. I am a Business Unit Controller for Silver King, Marmon Group Company under Berkshire Hathaway. Silver King is, yeah, we do refrigeration and freezer units, so we make the units that go in the back of restaurants such as McDonald's, Burger King, any of those types of things. I am the Business Unit Controller. I'm top of the company for accounting and finance. I do all of that, so that means I close the books at the end of the month, I run any of the financial analysis, do pricing, costing, look at what we are spending. I review people's expense reports, run through some of the procurement stuff, approve levels of buying capabilities and that. As always, with accounting and finance it all comes back down to the bottom line, where are we with operating profit and such, so it's always trying to make sure we're making the right business decisions, moving forward looking to cut costs but not cut quality, looking into some of those different things. Lead time comes into effect as well when you're looking at procurement and such, but it all just comes down to making sure you're saving money, making the right decisions for your customers and for your employees as well and then moving forward, keeping the business name strong and trying to make some more money as you go along so you can hire more people. So with the project in place I just recently had this where we have a younger engineer. We're redoing a couple of our manufacturing lines and didn't take into consideration some of the spend that was gonna need to happen like electrical line drops from the ceiling. That costs money to put that stuff in and he didn't consider that. So I recently just sat down with him and walked him through how to put together a project plan, put together the budget, track what's going on, getting the invoices, who you get the invoices from so you can tell where you are. Oh, you got, you know, they did the work. Where's the invoice? Oh yeah, we haven't paid that yet, so you still have that $38,000 pending. So where are you in that process, and just kind of working with them and helping them understand how to track the project and track the spend.
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